DECEMBER 7, 2018
As the nations of the world
are gathered in Poland to fret about the state of the climate, there’s an
unpleasant truth—one might say an inconvenient truth—that climate advocates
have long refused to face: Big Fossil Fuel has beaten us.
We’ve done our damnedest to
stop them from wrecking the climate, but they’re nonetheless pulling carbon
from the ground in wondrous quantities. It was once astonishing that in the
U.S. alone they could extract 55 quadrillion BTUs worth of oil, gas, and coal
each year, as they did from 1970 to 2005. (A new home furnace puts out about
50,000 BTUs.) But 55,000,000,000,000,000 BTUs looks almost quaint now. Big
Carbon extracted 60
quadrillion BTUs from U.S. soil in 2011, 70 quadrillion in 2015, and next year
it’s expected to be 75 quadrillion. No wonder the 40 billion tons in CO2-equivalent
greenhouse gases that our species emitted in
2001 became 45 billion in 2004, 50 billion in 2009, and 55 billion today.
Climactivists have mostly preferred to ignore these ugly facts and focus
instead on the impressive growth in renewable energy. And it is impressive.
But here’s another somewhat inconvenient truth: We’re not using the new
renewables to replace fossil fuels. We’re just using them to
keep up with new energy demands—demands from our growing population
and the newly consumptive lifestyles of once-poor peoples being lifted from
their poverty. In short, Big Carbon is a juggernaut that we’ve hardly checked.
Sure, we’ve won some important
skirmishes. We’ve gotten fracking banned in
New York, Maryland, and Vermont. We’ve convinced big investors who
control more
than $7 trillion in assets to divest the $400
billion or so they once held in fossil fuels. Last year when Big
Fossil Fuel put Prop 23 on the California ballot to poleaxe the state’s limits
on greenhouse gases, we outspent them
$30 million to $10 million and won the vote 61 percent to 39 percent. There’s
no denying our scrappy militia is growing bit by bit into a guerilla army.
The problem is the “bit by
bit” part. Big Carbon is the most powerful industry on earth, an empire as
mighty as the greatest political empires in history. They can buy whole
governments, not least ours. In 2015 and 2016, the $354 million they spent on
U.S. politicians and lobbyists yielded an 8,200
percent return in subsidies. Quite a tidy investment, that. And the
beauty is that it’s not just anti-climate Republicans on their dole. Most
Democrats are too. The much-misunderstood, supposedly green Barack Obama tucked
so many of Big Carbon’s bills into his waistband that he might as well have
been their private pole dancer. And boy, did he dance. By the end of his tenure
he had opened up so many oil and gas reserves and had adopted so many other
carbon-friendly policies that he could boast, accurately, of presiding over the
biggest
fossil-fuel boom in American history.
But where we’ve been trounced
most resoundingly is in the public mind. The think tanks, so called, that Big
Carbon has funded have spread the big lie that global warming is a hoax. Their
allied earth-loathers at Fox News and beyond have expanded on the
message—brilliantly convincing their audience that efforts to stop global
warming aren’t really efforts to stop global warming. They’re an assault on The
American Way of Life, a plot by neo-Bolsheviks who want not just to take away
our SUVs but to take away our liberties as well. America is now in a literally
dumbfounding state in which four
in ten presumably un-lobotomized citizens think humans aren’t causing
global warming, and five
in ten think global warming won’t pose a serious threat in their
lifetimes. By one poll an incredible nine
in ten Americans think scientists haven’t come to a consensus that
humans are behind global warming, despite the agreement of 97 percent of
scientists that we are. Plain and simple, Big Fossil Fuel has coldcocked us. We
have to give a tip of the hat to our esteemed foes.
That said, the good times
won’t last forever, and nobody knows it better than the Big Carbon and their
money men. Last year Jeffrey Sachs—Jeffrey Sachs—grimly warned investors
in fossil fuels, “Your investments are going to sour. The growing devastation
caused by climate change [is] going to blow a hole through your fossil-fuel
portfolio. Not only will the companies you own suffer as society begins to
abandon fossil fuels in earnest, they will also be dragged through the courts
here and abroad for their long-standing malfeasance and denial of what they
have done to the world.” And although Big Fossil Fuel isn’t yet suffering from
the plunging price of renewables—and won’t for some time—it will eventually.
Fossil firms are in the predicament of the besieged Tsarists at old Sevastopol,
who were holed up in a redoubt of such strength that they could, and did, make
their besiegers pay dearly to take it, even though it was inevitable their
defenses would fall and their empire molder. Fossil firms have given every sign
they intend to hold on to the bitterest of ends, sending Earth’s temperature
far beyond what we can reasonably handle and bringing ghastly suffering to a
great many of us.
When I say “far beyond what we
can reasonably handle,” you may think I’m referring to crossing the 2°C
line—the rise in the global mean temperature of 2°C (3.6°F) beyond the
pre-industrial norm. Up to 2°C we’re relatively safe. Beyond lies a dangerous
world. Or so our scientists, politicians, activists, and journalists have
told us time and again, mostly recently in the report of
the hyper-cautious UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said we
still have a dozen years before we’re in real trouble. But such statements are
another great fiction in the climate debate, second only to Big Carbon’s lie
that global warming is a hoax. The fact is, the earth will be horrifically unsafe
well before we reach 2°C, and saying otherwise lulls us into complacency.
How desperate is our
predicament? It’s crap-your-socks desperate. Perhaps you read David
Wallace-Wells’s influential and bleak article
last year in New York (parts of which, by the bye, were rightly criticized for
relying on iffy science but which overall got our plight right) and you think
you know how bad matters are. Alas, the predictions have gotten worse since
then, far worse, and only immediate, profoundly deep, and extravagantly
sweeping cuts in emissions can mitigate the worst of the coming cataclysm. The
patient work of climate advocates can’t get it done in time.
But here’s an idea that might.
What if we pay Big Carbon to get out of fossils and get into
renewables? The price tag, as I’ll show below, would run a bit under $3
trillion over a span of 12 years, or $240 billion a year. That would be
sufficient not only to keep fossil fuel executives gloriously rich (a
regrettable necessity if they are to buy into the plan) but also to ensure all
of their workers get good-paying jobs in renewable energy. Two hundred, forty
billion dollars isn’t cheap, but neither is it prohibitive. It’s about what we
spend each year on our niggardly support of the poor and disabled in the form
of food stamps, housing vouchers, disability aid, and earned-income tax
credits. It comes to all of 5.5 percent of our $4.4
trillion federal budget. That’s a small price to save humankind for a truly
horrid fate.
But giving $3 trillion to Big
Carbon isn’t something fiscally concerned conservatives will like much, nor
will it please Big Carbon–hating progressives. Nor the American millions who
are indifferent to all things climate. In fact, the only way this plan will
work is if enough of us understand just how monstrous is the fate that lies
before us. So here, very briefly, are a few examples of the climate holocaust
we’re facing.
The coming hellscape
Start with the megadrought that’s
expected to sear a goodly share of the Southwest. This is the Godzilla, the
Thanos, the Sharknado of droughts, a parching that, according to scientists at
NASA, Cornell, and Columbia, could last 25 to 50 years, kill nearly every tree
in the region, make agriculture all but impossible, swirl up toxic dust storms
so thick you can’t drive through them and sure as hell don’t want to breathe in
them, and dry up so many rivers and reservoirs that cities will be pitted
against one another other for water. When we hit global 2°C, the research says
there’s an 80 percent
chance of a southwestern megadrought sometime in the 21st century. If
you live in certain parts of the Midwest, you’re luckier. The odds there are a
mere 70 percent.
Ah, you might be thinking, but
2°C is still some distance down the road. After all, even with our carbon profligacy,
we’ve heated the climate to only a
little over 1.1°C. But that number is misleading because the physics
doesn’t allow us to just put the brakes on the warming once we finally stop
emitting fossil fuels. The heated climate will keep warming for many a year,
which will, to take just one example, melt more permafrost, which will release
more methane, which will melt more permafrost, and on and on. The committed warming
is due largely to heat that oceans have soaked up and that they’ll eventually,
gradually release into the atmosphere, like water in a warmed kettle whose heat
is surrendered little by little to the surrounding air. And consider this: Just
last month, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab and NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Lab concluded we’ve vastly underestimated, by up to 58 percent, just how
much heat the ocean is holding.
Even with that old, overly
rosy data, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology concluded
that the warming embedded in oceans and elsewhere will warm the earth another 0.3°C once
we stop emitting greenhouse gases. Which means even if we emitted our last
particle of carbon tomorrow, we’d stop just a hair under 1.5°C. And since it is
utterly impossible that we will stop emitting any and all carbon in the next
decade or two, 2°C is an all-but-certain fact.
And the Max Planck study was
one of the most optimistic. As far back as 2007, the IPCC said our committed
warming would be 0.6°C.
That’s truly cruddy news because the IPCC’s findings, which must be agreed on
by a large number of the world’s climate scientists, are inevitably
lowest-common-denominator affairs that have undersold our predicament time and
again.
There is a still worse
possibility. In 2013, a team of researchers led by James Hansen, the former
NASA climatologist and unheeded Cassandra who was the first person to
prominently alert the world to global warming, in 1988, concluded that if we
hit global 2°C, we’ll have a committed warming of 1°C
to 2°C, which means a final resting temperature of 3°C or 4°C. This isn’t
just progressive fearmongering.
Some fossil fuel giants agree.
A report from
Royal Dutch Shell a few years ago predicted an endpoint of no less than 4°C.
The science is clear about what happens if we get there. We’ll see such horrors
as the near-total collapse of the vast Greenland ice sheet, a nearly
two-mile-thick repository of frozen water. Coupled with a partial collapse
Antarctica’s ice sheets, sea levels could rise a sickening 35
feet—a far, far cry from the two or three feet we’ve long been told would
be the consequence of 2°C. Thirty-five feet would put the homes of 10 percent
of the world’s people underwater.
Just one more example of our
potential fate: As we edge our way toward 3°C or 4°C, the number of people who
will be displaced or killed by disease and famine, heat and flood, rising seas
and savage hurricanes, riot and war, will number 1 billion or so. Still more
people will endure unspeakable misery. Like Dengue fever, which had been on the
wane for decades in places like Latin America, but is now resurgent thanks to
the warmth and wet in which the mosquitos that carry it thrive. From 1990 to
2000 dengue infections doubled.
They doubled again the next decade and are on course to double once more by
2020. Each year nearly 400
million people are now infected with the virus, up from 50 to 100
million in 1988. One hundred million of those 400 million have symptoms. In its
worst form, dengue is known as break-bone fever because its victims feel as if
their bones are being crushed. There is no cure. It will reach the United
States within a few decades.
When horrors like these befall
us, the price of everything—food, fuel, healthcare, manufactures—will rise.
Some prices will soar. National economies will be hobbled or worse, and we’ll
almost certainly find ourselves in a global depression on a scale we’ve never
seen. The suggestions that
civilization, which is to say organized human existence, is in peril are not
the rantings of doomsayers. They’re the wisdom of those who care to look
without prejudice or fear, and they’ve been telling us for some time. But how
many of us listened when, say, one of the more distinguished scientists of our
time, E. O. Wilson of Harvard, warned in 2009, “A
few hundred years down the line they’ll look back and say the Dark Ages began
with the twenty-first century.”
Pay Big Fossil Fuel to go
green
So let’s talk about my $3
trillion plan, which I’m calling Cash to Convert. As I said, both progressives
and conservatives have reason to dislike giving big money to the captains of
carbon. But most of the money will go to the many small investors whose
retirement funds are tied up in fossil fuel stocks, to ordinary workers in
fossil fuel firms, and to other workers who’ll get jobs in the New Green Deal
that Cash to Convert will engender. According to a 2015 study led by
Stanford’s Mark Z. Jacobson, there could be a net 2 million U.S. jobs in
renewables as we move to carbon-zero, and we can get 80 percent of the way
there by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. Cash to Convert would take us through
2030.
To become 80 percent
carbon-free, we’ll need to overhaul our economy overnight, just as our
grandparents did in the Second World War—remaking car factories into
tank factories, expanding modest shipyards into immense producers of aircraft
carriers and submarines, converting textile plants to make parachutes and
helmet straps and uniforms by the millions, building enormous factories to turn
out the rivets and altimeters and windshields that became the fighter planes
that won the air war over Africa and Europe.
America will need about 6,500
gigawatts of renewable energy to replace all fossil fuels. (A gigawatt
is a lot. Just 70 gigs can power the electric grid of the entire state of New
York during even its worst heat waves.) Roughly speaking, to make 1 gig of
solar panels per year requires one factory of 1,500 workers. To get to
carbon-zero, we’d need hundreds of these factories. And that’s just for solar
panels. We’re also going to need batteries, wind turbines, and geothermal
equipment in previously unthinkable quantity.
But manufacturing will be only
a modest part of the new green economy. Most of the growth will come from
building and maintaining the new electric grid, because renewables, of course,
produce only electricity. We’ll have to retrofit existing carbon-fired power
plants to become electric ones, we’ll have to build new plants and substations,
we’ll have to run millions of miles of new wire, and we’ll have to install
billions of solar panels, wind turbines, and geothermal tubes in every part of
America. That should be awfully appealing to an awful lot of Congresspeople, to
have all that pork—er, investment—to pass out in literally every Congressional
district in the country.
How do our titanic fossil fuel
firms fit in? We put them in charge of most of this transition—running the
factories and power plants, maintaining the electric lines and wind farms,
installing the rooftop solar panels and the backyard geothermal systems. They
wouldn’t get all of the market. Firms already in green energy would share in
the spoils. But Big Carbon, as Big Carbonless, would be assured of an empire as
sweeping as the one they command now.
Big Carbon will, of course,
have some objections. One is that although they are used to running some of our
energy infrastructure, they have little or no experience in manufacturing and
installation. Subsidies won’t change that. But the subsidies of Cash to Convert
aren’t merely subsidies. They’re guarantees from taxpayers to carry the firms
until they’re far enough down the learning curve in their new industry to turn
good profits. During the transition, in any year that fossil fuel companies
don’t make the profits they’re making now, taxpayers will pay them the
difference. Not a bad deal, huh?
Some people who work in Big
Fossil Fuel will have another objection: Why get out of a profitable industry
that they know exceedingly well? Why risk change? The answer is that change is
already on the way. As I’ve said, the industry won’t decline soon, but neither
is its decline in the distant future. This is a chance to get out while the
gettin’s good.
The price
The study from Stanford’s
Jacobson that I mentioned found that the cost of building and installing the
entire new green network in the U.S. would be about $14 trillion over the three
decades through 2050. (Some researchers dispute some of
Jacobson’s conclusions, but the criticisms are themselves disputed.)
That’s $440 billion a year, which sounds like a lot until you consider that
Jacobson’s group found we’ll spend more than $14 trillion just to keep the
fossil-fuel network running through 2050. So in the long run, the net cost of
going green is nothing. But building the green infrastructure—and building it
in a hurry—will cost real coin upfront, which is where Cash to Convert comes
in. Taxpayers won’t have to pay the whole $440 billion each year, partly
because we’ll redirect some of the billions we’re already spending on our
energy infrastructure to the green infrastructure and partly because the new
investment in green energy will beget profits that will beget more investment,
which will pay for some of the infrastructure. But we might pessimistically say
taxpayers will have to pay about half of that $440 billion a year—call it $200
billion—for the 12 years of Cash to Convert.
We’ll also need to reimburse
the fossil fuel industry for its stranded assets, the money it has sunk into
oil rigs and rail lines and super-ports that haven’t yet earned back their
cost. Some of these can be retooled for renewables. Others will pay for
themselves before the 12 years are up because the fossil firms will keep using
them—and profiting from them—while we make the transition to carbon-zero.
According to the financial-climatological think-tank Carbon Tracker, if
U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies
stopped all extractions today, they’d have about $370 billion in stranded
assets. If we’re again pessimistic, we might estimate the cost to taxpayers at
$300 billion, $25 billion per annum. That’s federal chump change—a mere
half what
we spend each year on the Department of Housing and Urban Development,
and we don’t give a frog’s fart about HUD, and didn’t even before it was
decorated, so to speak, by the furniture-fond Secretary Ben Carson.
Another expense is our
guarantee that fossil fuel executives will keep getting their handsome pay
because, of course, they’re never going to go for Cash to Convert if they don’t.
Data on what these folks make are hard to come by, but in recent years the top
dozen fossil fuel CEOs hoed in about half
a billion dollars combined. Most fossil fuel executives made far less.
Of late, for instance, the thirteenth best remunerated CEO didn’t even clear
$10 million. (I don’t know how he faced the other fellows at the racket club.)
It gets more impoverished still further down the chain of command. A typical
chief compliance officer, for instance, earns about $170,000.
But again, let’s be hard on taxpayers and say executives below the top twelve
pulled in average $1 million a year, and let’s also pessimistically say there
are 2,000 of these second-tier executives in Big Fossil Fuel. That would put
their total pay at just $2 billion a year. Throw in that $500 million for the
top dozen CEOs and maybe another $500 million or so for the well-paid boards of
directors, plus another $500 million in slop for any unknowns, and we’re only
up to $3.5 billion a year. We wouldn’t literally have to pay all that because,
again, fossil firms will still make money during the conversion. But even if we
had to pay most of it—say $2 billion a year—these are but pence plucked from
the federal purse.
Of course, carbon investors
won’t support Cash to Convert unless we protect their money too. According to
the American Petroleum Institute, in big
boom years like 2005 to 2007, the annual return on investment in oil
and gas was 14.6 percent. In big bust years, like 2002, ROI was a mere 2.8
percent. More typical are the returns of 6.4 percent of 2012 and 5.8 percent of
2014. The profits of U.S. coal are murkier but (forgive me) they’re
clearly in
the pits and needn’t trouble us much.
What fossil fuel investors
want—what almost all long-term investors want—is a steady return. Boom years
are a delight, but they come with sorrow of bust years. If we guaranteed
investors the robust 6 percent returns in good years, most would be well
satisfied. After all, 6 percent is a damn sight better than the 3.3 percent ROI
per year that the Standard & Poor 500 has averaged since 2000. So here’s
the Cash to Convert guarantee: Whenever the returns on Big Carbon stocks dip
below 6 percent, Cash to Convert will pay the difference. (And again, to be
fair, we’d do the same for shareholders who have already invested in green
energy. Their number, however, is comparatively small, so the taxpayers’ tab
for them will be trivial.)
Estimating the cost of
guaranteeing that 6 percent is tricky because of uncertainties in the value of
companies and fluctuations in their stocks. What’s certain is that last year
the market capitalization of the 25 largest publicly traded U.S. oil and gas
companies, plus the market capitalization of most of the publicly traded U.S.
coal company, came to $1.15
trillion. Lesser publicly held fossil fuel companies are much smaller and
would add only a smidge to that total. Privately held fossil fuel firms are
also much smaller than publicly traded firms, with the exception of Koch
Industries, the domain of the feared Koch brothers, who have bankrolled the
biggest of the climate change fibs.
(Even the Kochs, however, are showing faint but noticeable signs of moderation,
as when Charles said “there
is some science behind it [global warming]. Like, there are greenhouse gases,
and they do contribute to warming.”) The Koch kingdom, if its ratio of ROI to
profits is something like that of publicly traded firms, would be capitalized
at around $130 billion, while the remaining privately held firms might be worth
a combined $300 billion. That would put the value of all U.S.-based fossil fuel
firms at about $1.5 trillion, on which an annual 6 percent return would be $90
billion. If we continue forecasting gloomily and assume that renewables,
although booming
now and although projected to keep
booming, will get mediocre returns in the immensely expanded green
economy—if, let’s say, they do even a little worse than the S&P 3.3
percent, yielding 3 percent returns, we would need to pay $45 billion a year to
get investors to the promised 6 percent.
And then there are the fossil
fuel workers, the roughnecks of the Permian Basin, geoengineers of the Power
River Basin, fracking accountants in Fargo, and pipefitters in Paducah. Cash to
Convert must make sure that all of these workers get equivalent jobs in the
green economy or get training for new jobs—and that whatever the jobs, they pay
as well as the old ones.
This would be pretty cheap if
we only had to take care of workers in fossil fuel companies proper. King Coal,
for instance, employs just 53,000 people in
the United States. Arby’s employs 80,000.
Even oil and gas firms employ only 182,000 people.
Solar employs 260,000,
wind 102,000.
But there are a lot more
people who work in companies that are wholly or partly dependent on fossil
fuels, like the railways that haul coal, the power plants that turns it into
electricity, the gas stations where we fill our tanks. In total, there are
about 2 million workers in fossil fuel–related sectors, and according to
Jacobson’s study, that’s about how many jobs we’ll lose as we make the
carbon-free switch. But here’s the good news: We’ll create about 4 million new
jobs. The net, 1.9 million jobs, will mean an abundance of work to choose from,
and the extra $236 billion in new individual income will be a boon to the
economy.
In taking care of fossil fuel
workers, the biggest costs that taxpayers will be helping them retrain and
paying them during the transition. Happily, most workers won’t need retraining
because their jobs and skills pretty nearly match those in renewable energy.
Office managers and marketers, welders and plumbers, truck drivers and
heavy-equipment operators, janitors and groundskeepers will be just as needed
in green firms as in brown ones. According to a study by Edward Louie of Oregon
State University and Joshua Pearce of Michigan Tech, 65 to 70
percent of coal workers could slot into solar jobs with little ado. No
one has studied the question for the oil and gas industries, but we probably
wouldn’t be too far wrong if we assumed the numbers were roughly similar.
But even for those 65 to 70
percent, we’ll need to make sure they earn as much money in their new green
jobs as they did in their old fossil fuel jobs. Louie and Pearce found that 60
percent of workers in the extractive part of the coal industry—miners,
ordinance handlers, and their supporting accountants, secretaries, and
supervisors—would get an average pay raise of $4,000 a year. Among those who
work in coal-fired power plants, 85 percent would get an average raise of
$7,000. Taking all workers in coal extraction and power generation, only 29
percent would make less, at an average loss of $12,700. This is the difference
taxpayers would need to make up. Again, no one has done a similar study for the
nearly 2 million workers in oil, natural gas, and dependent industries, but if
we assume the numbers to be proportionate to those in coal, 585,000 total
fossil fuel workers would lose $12,700 a year. That’s $7.4 billion a year for
the dozen years of Cash to Convert—or it would be if every carbon worker left
her job and went into to renewables immediately, which of course won’t happen.
Moreover, some workers will leave their jobs through normal attrition or
retirement. But to continue our bleak estimating, let’s say we’ll have to pay
$5 billion a year—again, a piffling cost.
We’ll also need to pay to
retrain the 30 to 35 percent of fossil fuel workers who won’t be able to slide
seamlessly into a renewable job. Retraining gets a deservedly bad rap. We’ve
all heard the stories of the auto workers and steelmakers whose jobs were
NAFTA’d to Guanajuato or made surplus by robots and who were supposed to be
retrained to become computer programmers—and who now work at Home Depot for
$10.50 an hour. Cash to Convert has to do better. Thirty to 35 percent of the industry’s
workforce comes to about 670,000 workers. Subtract those who’ll retire or go
into another line of work, and we might have to retrain 500,000. According to
Professors Louie and Pearce, training a coal worker to become a solar worker
costs between $1,200 and $12,500. If we assume similar numbers for other energy
workers, we’ll spend $600 million to $6.3 billion on our 500,000 trainees.
Let’s assume the higher figure.
We’ll also need to pay these
people during their training, and if Cash to Convert is to gain broad support,
those payments will need to be as much as they’re making now. Most training
programs for solar jobs last six to eighteen months. Typical is an academic
year, nine months. For part of those nine months, trainees would get the usual
unemployment benefits, but these run from crummy in blue states to abysmal in
red states. We can expect them to cover only about one-third of the lost salary
of trainees. We’ll have to pick up the rest, the equivalent of six months of
their old pay. The average annual wage for those workers in coal extraction and
coal-fired power plants is $59,000, while for those in oil and gas extraction
it’s $69,000.
We don’t know exactly what workers in the many other carbon-dependent sectors
make, but unless Jiffy Lube and 7-Eleven have quietly raised their average
wages to $34.50 an hour, most of them undoubtedly earn a lot less. Let’s
nonetheless aim high again and say the average worker in a fossil
fuel–dependent job earns the $59,000 of the average coal workers. To pay
500,000 trainees half a year of that wage would cost $14.8 billion. Add the
$6.3 billion cost of the actual training, and the total retraining bill would
be $21 billion. Not a bad one-time investment to create jobs that would
generate $30 billion in personal income year in and year out.
We should also guarantee that
workers have the chance to work where they want, including, if they like, where
they live now. This would be easy to achieve if we simply put the first round
of all those manufacturing plants I mentioned in coal country, oil country, and
gas country. And we should give former fossil fuel workers dibs on those jobs.
Moreover, in every community in America, we will need workers to put thousands
upon thousands of solar panels on roofs, to string untold miles of power lines,
and to maintain these and all the rest of the grid. And since it’s American
taxpayers who are paying for it, we should ban corporations from offshoring the
manufacturing jobs. But even if we failed to win that, most of the jobs
couldn’t be offshored anyway—not unless someone has found a way for a crew in
Suzhou to install solar panels in San Antonio or workers in Pleihu to put up
power lines in Portland.
And here’s one more perk for
workers: Very few renewable jobs pollute the communities in which they’re
located. They don’t poison the water and air. They don’t sicken the old. They
don’t give cancer to the young.
We can afford this
If you add up all of the above
costs, the gross price to taxpayers is $3.4 trillion. That’s $280 billion a
year spread across a dozen years. New savings and revenues will bring the cost
down a bit. We’d ditch the $15 billion in subsidies we give fossil fuel
companies each year, and we’ll take in at least that much in new taxes from our
2 million new jobs and new corporate gains. (I’m looking only at federal taxes
here, but new taxes for state and local governments will also be substantial.)
The net cost will look something like $2.9 trillion, or $240 billion a year.
That’s not nothing, but we spend $886 billion a year on the military, $625
billion on Medicare, $412 billion on Medicaid. Cash to Convert’s $3 trillion
compares pretty favorably with the $7
trillion in tax cuts that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress
handed out between 2001 to 2012, or the $6 trillion
to $10
trillion of the Trump tax cuts, or the $6
trillion for our blundering adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
and Syria, or the $5
trillion to $29 trillion we
lavished on the Too Big to Fail Banks after they crashed the economy in 2008.
Moreover, if we wanted to, we wouldn’t even have to spend $3 trillion to spend
$3 trillion. In fact, we wouldn’t have to spend a penny. We could just ask the
Federal Reserve to print the money, which is what it did during the Great
Recession—creating, out of the thinnest of air, nearly
$4 trillion between 2008 and 2014. That’s $570 billion a year, more
than twice the Cash to Convert budget.
Making Cash to Convert real
I fear the biggest opponents
to Cash to Convert will be not my conservative friends with whom I so often
spar but rather my progressive friends with whom I so often agree. They will
detest the thought of keeping Big Fossil Fuel CEOs in Caligulan splendor, a
detestation I share, but I think their greater objection, which I also share,
will be that Cash to Convert does nothing to check capitalism—the overawing
force that in its current rapacious form and with its demand for unceasing
growth has brought us to the climate brink. Progressives must understand this
is a problem for another day. They can, if they like, see themselves as
Roosevelts for whom an alliance with Stalin is the only way to stop a greater
evil. And for salve, there is the thought that only 1 percent of Cash to
Convert’s $3 trillion will go to the captains of carbon, the rest to ordinary
people.
For those of you who agree we
must enact Cash to Convert or something very like it—for those, that is, who
believe civilization is at dire risk and that only drastic action can save
us—you’ll also agree that Cash to Convert must come before every other
political goal. We must demand it be given primacy in Congress, statehouses,
city council chambers, churches, union halls, and anywhere else people gather.
We must push it in legislation and promote it in initiatives, and we must
withhold our support from any candidate, big or small, until he or she gets
behind it.
We must, in short, subordinate
all other goals to Cash to Convert. This won’t be easy. Black lives matter.
Abortion rights matter. The Fight for $15 matters. The Second Amendment
matters. Fiscal responsibility matters. Gay wedding cakes matter. All true,
even if we don’t agree which way they matter. What we can agree on is that if
we don’t do something about the climate now, none of these matters will matter.
We needn’t abandon our other goals, but they must come second.
None of what I’m proposing
should be interpreted as a call to abandon the fight against Big Fossil Fuel—at
least not until Cash to Convert is made law. Our fight is our leverage. So keep
marching in the streets, blockading ports, banning fracking, suing fossil fuel
corporations, disrupting shareholder meetings, and all the rest. But also
understand, as King and Gandhi understood of their protests, that while it is
good to defeat your foes, it is better still to bring them to your side. We
cannot win this fight unless they come to our side. If the price is giving them
a few billion dollars, is that so much to avert a climate holocaust?
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